COMICA NEWS

Joe Sacco’s Comica Interview Online

Posted: January 10, 2010

On 29 September 2009, Comica welcomed Joe Sacco to London at the ICA. Joe was in town to discuss his new book Footnotes In Gaza with comics historian Roger Sabin. The full transcript of this talk is now available online at the Eye Magazine Blog:

RS: If you’re going to write about a massacre, you’re going to attract a certain amount of flak about whether this is Israel-bashing. How do you respond to that?

JS: What I tried to do was get as many eyewitnesses as possible. And I felt like I needed to be convinced by it. I think in the book I talk about the problems of the story, or certain people’s stories.

RS: Did you make an effort to talk to Israelis, to get their side of the story?

JS: I got two Israeli researchers to go through the archives to see what they could find. Which turned out to be almost close to zero about the Khan Younis incident: the second incident, there is something about that. There was one Israeli soldier who actually wrote about this in the early 1980s. And he wrote about coming across, as he put it, a human slaughterhouse. He had died, but I managed to call his widow. And she gave me the number of a guy he mentions in the story, and I managed to track that guy down. He really evaded the issue - he said he saw nothing himself. He finally told me that this guy was actually kind of a newspaper man. But he meant that in a pejorative sense. ‘Ah, he’s a newspaper man. He’s going to tell you lies anyway.’ So I include that in the book. It’s always harder to get stories from people who might have committed atrocities or seen them from the side that committed them. It’s always going to be more difficult. I think at some point Israeli historians have to step in.

RS: There are a couple: there’s Benny Morris.

JS: There are definitely great Israeli historians who have been detailing this sort of thing. I sat with Benny Morris and we talked about it. I called up every Israeli historian that I could get hold of. Some of them knew about the incidents, but none had examined it themselves. Benny Morris knew about it - he called it a massacre. And Benny Morris himself is actually quite right wing, but he’s a very good historian.

RS: So when you’re dealing with something as atrocious as this, is there a psychological effect on you? Does it take a toll?

JS: I got tired of drawing bodies. [Long Silence]...